Tonight at Tonia's, The Bastard Julio Insulted My Work

My coat passes another dark window.
An unleashed dog slinks
to a grove of garbage cans.
Cul-de-sacs of white bungalows
scallop the hill-face,
as if a hundred young girls,
their skirts beaded in miniature lights,
have knelt in calculated swoons,
awaiting the naughty young boys of their lives.
In the distance,
someone whistles on the blacktop.

A gray woman scurries from a door
impaled on a black iron fence and hurries
into the foyer of the house next door.
A lamp flickers on and off.
Hands pull the curtains of a steaming window.
My hand lifted in front of my face
covers them all, a nimbus of yellowed air
crackling from my fingers.
Behind my palm, a bedroom jumps
from the second story.
I hear the clatter of metal
and turn to see a bone
rattling across the sidewalk.
Shall I kick the dog?

Neither Julio with his foolish mouth
nor Tonia with her steaming pots of soup
or my wife, closeted with her creams
and lipsticks in 13 colors,
or the fog in the upstairs window
can tell me what a man should be.
We orbit the moon.
On the street corner, signs flicker:
Walk. Don't walk.
Cups and saucers rattle in our hands.
We can grip nothing but appendages--
a handle, a crank,
an arm.

From the hillside, the jeweled streets
lace their fingers together
and incline their shining heads toward the east.
I throw a paper toward a dark, yawning stoop.
We are all leaning
toward morning.

You Can't Depend on it Getting Cold, Not

steady, not so the whites can be packed away,
not so they can be sealed from the dust of potential

usage. In this we are all children, hungry

for the mothers we didn't have, holding our arms out
for someone to fit us with sleeves, lifting our faces

toward a delicate snow

or the door where somebody ought to call us
to come in, let us know that it's time

to come in. You can't depend on it staying warm,
not with nightfall lurking around, not so
you can put on sandals, a sleeveless shirt, walk

uptown, past tall gray buildings gently
falling asleep, their courtyards and second-floor

tobacco shops strung with the twinkling
lights of a perennial Christmas and only

two blocks down a one-room shop, hats
haunting the window, a pair of gloves,
their pearlized buttons beseeching you never

to set them apart because what good's a single
hand? What in the world can a single

hand do? You can't count on

more than a day's rain, not
a season of rainfall, not enough

that the river will overflow, spill itself
over the good and civilized land, not so
the fields will be flooded or the parks emptied

of children. The children are always back
tomorrow, filling the long rectangles of sand
with their laughter and their knotted shoes,

their mothers and fathers nearby,
one foot on the curb, shading

their eyes, some smiling, some
reaching absently for a hanky or leaning
to tip a see-saw in favor of a lighter child, some

empty-handed, some gripping a bucket, a spade,
the flapping wrist of a small

sweater, but all with one hand shading their eyes, all
looking carefully to the sky.